Four letters from Vladimir Ilyich to A. N. Potresov, spanning the period from September 1898 to June 1899, represent a very significant contribution to the history of the formation of Leninism. We see in them Lenin at a moment when revisionism — both international and Russian — is only just beginning to take the stage of history. Bernstein's gospel of revisionism, his book, came out only in January 1899 and had not yet reached Eastern Siberia, where Lenin lived. The "Separate Supplement to Rabochaya Mysl" — the most candid product of Russian economism — had not yet appeared. Struve, Tugan-Baranovsky, Bulgakov still considered themselves Marxists and were considered Genossen, party comrades. The exploits abroad of Prokopovich, Kuskova, etc., had not yet reached Siberia. Vladimir Ilyich's information in general was weak and far from sufficient. But thousands of versts away from the centers of the workers' movement and Marxist thought — from Berlin, Petersburg, and Geneva — Vladimir Ilyich sensed that revisionist rot was in the air.

Bourgeois rot he perceived in the fashionable Kantianism beginning to gain favor, in the as yet timid attempts to revise Marx's economic doctrine, in Bulgakov's "trashing" of Kautsky... From all this Vladimir Ilyich, as he himself writes, begins to fall into "frenzy." From his "not-beautiful distant land" he does not yet see the true disposition of the opponent's forces, cannot judge whether this or that utterance (Struve's, Bulgakov's, or Bernstein's itself) is a partial error of a "comrade" or genuine betrayal, a final transition to an alien class perspective; he had not yet seen the principal works of his opponents (Bernstein's book, the declarations of Rabochaya Mysl and Prokopovich), but he already cannot "restrain himself" and begins military action, "pasting in remarks and sallies" against revisionism in his legal articles on, it would seem, academic themes.

After a few months — following his acquaintance with Bernstein's book, with Prokopovich-Kuskova's "Credo," with Rabochaya Mysl — these "sallies" will transform into a direct frontal assault across the entire front of revisionism.

But already now Lenin is indignant and marvels: why is Plekhanov silent? why does he not fire? (see our note 18 to the fourth letter, from June 27, 1899). At the same time, between the lines of letters, which were of course designed to pass through the "black cabinets" of the tsarist secret police, there clearly shines through the thought of the insufficiency of legal-Marxist literature, of the necessity for a clear demarcation with "disguised liberals" passing themselves off as Marxists, of the categorical need to create genuine Marxist party press, of the future Iskra and Zarya.

The letters being published are remarkable, and valuable for Lenin's biography and the history of Leninism, precisely in that they lay bare the inner work that was seething in Lenin during the silent years of exile and which led him to the creation of Iskra with its orthodox "intolerance" and "fierce" struggle against revisionism in all its forms and shades. And only in this struggle could the program and tactics of proletarian communism be forged — communism that was destined to pass through three revolutions and become the banner of the proletarian revolution of the twentieth century. Concerning this silent preparatory stage, we have until now been able to judge only from scattered and inevitably obscure hints in Lenin's legal articles of 1898 and the first half of 1899 (see the indication of these hints in my introductions and afterwords to volumes II and III of the Collected Works).

The letters being published lay before us a genuine picture of Vladimir Ilyich's thoughts and moods of that time.

These letters are also interesting in the remarks devoted in them to Axelrod's pamphlet "The Historical Position and Mutual Relations of Liberal and Socialist Democracy in Russia." The very title of the pamphlet shows that it is devoted to the fundamental question of the Russian revolution, namely that question which already in the first revolution of 1905 divided Bolsheviks and Mensheviks once and for all. The foundational significance of this Axelrod pamphlet for Menshevism is beyond question. It is no wonder that Menshevik historians of the party and revolution consider it precisely the highest expression of Menshevik tactical wisdom. All the more remarkable is it that already upon first acquaintance with it in 1899, Lenin clearly and decisively noted those dangerous tendencies which then, beginning in 1904, wholly determined Menshevik tactics of servility to liberalism. Axelrod — wrote Lenin in 1899 — should have "more sharply brought out the class character of the workers' movement, and then not been so favorable to the oppositional agrarians" (the zemstvo men, and later — the Cadets. L. K.). Further: "in my opinion, 'to utilize'" (i.e., to make use of the liberal movement. L. K.) "is a far more precise and fitting word than support and alliance." Further: "Support" (for the workers' movement. L. K.) "will come far from the intelligentsia and liberal landowners alone" (the zemstvo men. L. K.), "but also from those peasants who are disposed to represent not the prejudices but the Reason, the future and not the past of their class." "Axelrod fought against an abstract, contemptuous attitude toward moderate liberals (it is correct that one ought not at all to hold them in contempt, that one must utilize them) and thereby as it were obscured that independent and more decisive position occupied by the workers' movement" — summed up Lenin.

Is it not then in these positions of Axelrod (whom Vladimir Ilyich at that time regarded with the greatest respect) and Lenin's counter-positions on the fundamental questions of revolution that there lies dormant, as in a seed, all the future opposition between Menshevism and Bolshevism in the years of the first revolution?

If to all that has been indicated above we add that the published letters contain most curious remarks concerning the article "What Inheritance Are We Rejecting?", remarks on other Lenin articles, and a mass of incidental observations on philosophy, Marx's theory, contemporary journalism, etc., then the value of the letters becomes entirely obvious. The letters have been preserved in the archive of A. N. Potresov, to whom we owe gratitude for the possibility of their publication. In the commentary on the letters, comrade A. Ya. Troitsky rendered me substantial assistance.

L. Kamenev.